This interview is part of our Expert Advice series, where CEO's, CMO's and best selling authors share their expertise.
Paul May is CEO and Co-Founder of BuzzStream. He runs a unique business, helping other business track their "buzz" and to create new activity. Because of his expertise, he offers a unique perspective helping other online business owners increase their online exposure - and being able to track it.
1. What is BuzzStream?
BuzzStream provides tools to help marketers build and manage relationships with word-of-mouth influencers. This includes tools for finding and researching influencers, track relationships with them across a team, and planning and executing personalized outreach with them.
2. What motivated you to start BuzzStream?
My co-founder (Jeremy Bencken, who created a large real estate website) and I had been impacted by a couple of trends that drove the initial idea for BuzzStream.
First, more people were relying on either word-of-mouth or search to find the service and the key to both was to build relationships with the influencers in the market our companies served.
Second, because media was fragmenting so dramatically (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.), the number of people you needed to actually reach out to in order to actually make an impact was increasing dramatically (and you can’t do it in a spammy, mass mail kind of way). We found that the tools to find the right people to reach out to and to keep track of the relationships with them were lacking. That led to BuzzStream.
3. Who is BuzzStream for?
Our customer base is split along a few different axes – first the primary user of the product is either a social media marketer, a public relations professional or a search marketer. For each of these groups, we have a mix of in-house customers and agencies. We tend to provide the most value to teams of marketers who need a centralized place from which to conduct influencer research, manage those relationships, keep accurate records, monitor for engagement opportunities and collaborate across a team.
4. Your offering is broken into two sections: 1) PR & Social Media and 2) Link Management. Please explain both approaches.
The common thread between both groups is “managing relationships.” Both groups have the same need, but take slightly different approaches to the problem. They’re both trying to find the right people to reach out to, in hopes that it will eventually lead to links and/or mentions. That being said, there are some differences between the needs of the two groups:
- Our approach with PR & Social Media product is to give teams a centralized place to conduct research, house contact information and monitor influencer relationships. Through centralization we give the team a 360 degree view of their outreach efforts and the ability to efficiently delegate tasks across teams so everyone stays on the same page.
- With the Link Management product it’s about automating many of the tasks SEO’s find mundane while giving them a centralized place to store and share all information around their link building efforts. There’s a lot of overlap in the communication tracking capabilities in the PR and Social Media product because link building is increasingly looking more and more like traditional PR. It’s about finding the right content provider, building a relationship and getting a link.
5. How do you "build relationships with social media influencers"? Are relationships something that can be automated?
Absolutely not, which is why we built BuzzStream. The goal is to automate the manual tasks associated with tracking relationships, finding influencers, looking for contact information, etc., without changing your typical workflow. The goal is to take these out of the way so you can focus on what matters – building the relationship.
6. How do you "build relationships with websites to drive links"? Is this automated or done by a real person?
All outreach has to be done by a real person.
7. Why should they use your service? What benefit might be expected?
Because customers are increasingly relying on influencers to guide their purchase decision, the business’ revenue is increasingly driven by the number and quality of relationships you develop. BuzzStream allows you to spend less time on manual tasks, so you can build more relationships. Ultimately this leads to more revenue.
8. What is your niche in the social networking world? How does monitoring actually increase revenues?
Our niche is influencer relationship management. Identifying key influencers and building relationships with them matters to customers because word-of-mouth is a huge component in how people make purchase decisions today.
We have monitoring in our product, but it’s really there primarily as a tool to surface influencers. We rarely compete head-on with the pure play monitoring vendors/listening platforms.
